Blind Rage
by seriousblahblah
Summary: Draco is a tortured artist. Hermione is his muse. But can Hermione help this broken Death Eater see the light again? AU Dramione. Dark, warnings of verbal abuse and servant/master assault. When you are blind with rage, can you see the colours anymore?


Summary: Draco is a tortured artist. Hermione is his muse. But can Hermione help this broken Death Eater see the light again? AU dramione. Dark, warnings of verbal abuse and assault.

[Prompts: Rembrandt House Museum; (action) Painting (scenario) A very wealthy person/family running out of money (word) Reconstruct]

* * *

 **Blind Rage**

~o~

Draco stared in disquiet at the half-finished canvas on which he had splayed streams and layers of dark liquid black and blue. This was the palette, the background, on which he would build the foreground and eventually another of his masterpieces. But it was no use. There was this urge deep inside him to rip apart the canvas and throw his coal pens and brushes and paint bottles against the room and scream.

Draco grasped at his short blond hair and moaned to himself, trying to breathe in deeply to calm himself and quell the inner turmoil that threatened to tear him apart. Nothing could reconstruct what he felt before.

"It's no use, it's no use," he moaned to himself and barely repressed a wretched, anguished scream.

His inspiration, his gravitas, his life force was gone.

Draco got up from his painter's stool and threw several glass and porcelain dishes against the wall. Taking small comfort in how they broke into many tiny irreparably pieces, sort of symbolic for his soul.

 _I'm broken,_ he thought to himself. _I'm a wild animal in painter's clothes. I'm not even sane anymore._ His hands scratched at his wrist where a scar once lay.

It didn't help that since the Malfoy family had lost most of its assets, Draco barely had enough money to buy the turpentine and tints that were so necessary to his craft.

 _Everything is going down the gutter,_ he thought and crushed one of his paint brushes under his hand, snapping the wood in half with a loud snap.

He didn't even care that his hand was bleeding.

 _Let his hand bleed, for he does no work,_ he thought grimly to himself. The words faintly echoing of his father, who had taught him his art and been his harshest critic.

Suddenly Draco's thoughts were interrupted as one of his servants, one of his last remaining servants, knocked at his door to be let in.

"Sir, you called me?" the young girl with brown hair said. "I heard a crash."

Draco scowled at this servant that dared to interrupt. His young servant was growing bolder and bolder and less respectful by the day.

"I was painting!" he muttered.

The girl shook her head, the wild curls of her hair falling over her warm brown eyes.

"If you excuse me sir, it sounded like you were breaking things, not painting," she said in a half-whisper as her eyes trailed accusingly across the floor where his broken paintbrushes and porcelain lay. She cleared her throat and repressed a smirk.

Draco could not believe the cheek of his servant. He bored his eyes even more into her face, examining her and wondering where she had got the nerve to address him as such. Did this lowly servant care so little for her work that she wanted to be thrown out onto the streets?

He could make it happen! The girl should not test his patience.

Draco stepped towards her, towering over the thin, waifish girl with her defiant eyes.

"What," he drawled, "gives you the right to address me as such? Do you have no regard for your place, so little respect for your _master_?"

He raised his forearm menacingly, as if intending to strike her. Though it was just a bluff and he had no intention whatsoever of hitting anyone, especially anyone so small and obviously weak. He broke plates and threw cups and furniture when he was angry, but he was yet to strike another human being—at least not without good cause.

Which this defiant, lowly servant was really drawing out of him.

To his extreme annoyance—and beguilement—instead of being afraid of him and showing fear, the young servant girl smirked and began to chuckle as he threatened to throttle her.

She coughed and tried to conceal her chuckle as he stared daggers through her. His silver eyes glinting.

"Sir," she pleaded evenly. "I only spoke so boldly out of concern. You do seem to have been troubled," she coughed again, "and not painting much since," cough, "the Mistress left the Manor."

"Do not ever mention the Mistress again," he warned her, his hands shaking with the desire to...he couldn't even think, he needed to grab something and break it again. His eyes searched the room for another thing to break, another piece of porcelain he could smash...

"Sir, I think you should get over your grief, if only for your art, which suffers—"

The girl screeched and couldn't finish his sentence as Draco moved swiftly over to her and pressed her against the wall, his hands at either side of her head, and those defiant, beguiling brown eyes.

"I. told. you. not to mention the Mistress again," he hissed directly into her ear, repressing the urge to drag his teeth across her earlobe and even bite her.

He was truly half-animal now, and not the sophisticated gentleman and aristocrat painter he had been before.

Since his fall and the unravelment of Malfoy Manor's wealth, he was raw, raw, raw and ragged with rage. He wanted to break things, he often did break things, but it was usually porcelain and glass and random inanimate objects he took his rage out on. But now this girl had gotten into his crossfires, and she had deliberately put herself in the way, so that he was tempted to break her. To shatter her against the wall like he'd shattered that cup a moment ago.

This girl dared to push his buttons; she would find he was not so forgiving.

"Didn't I tell you not to press me?" he growled at her.

The girl, shakily, started to nod. They were both pressed up against his studio's ancient wood-paneled walls and she could barely move her head without touching him, but she nodded twice.

"I'm sorry."

"Good," Draco said. He lifted his body a few inches off her so that he could appraise her face and trembling hands more clearly.

He felt calmer and slightly less angry when he was saw how much the servant girl was trembling and how pale her face was because he'd frightened her. God, she might have even thought he wanted to...to take advantage of her.

Draco backed away from her completely as if scalded.

"I'm sorry, I lost my temper."

"You often do," she gasped, still breathing very heavily, yet still that core of defiance and steel remained in her brown eyes as they met his.

"You're very brave," he said automatically. He wasn't sure why he was beginning a conversation with a lowly servant, as if they were equal or had a mind of their own. Doubtless, this girl had never been educated in her life and she probably couldn't even read or write. She'd probably been a servant all her life and never opened a book or heard fine music, or even seen any paintings, until his own of course. But something in her fierce eyes told him not to underestimate her. She had fire.

She seemed to gather herself up and ease made its way back into her muscles, as she twisted her arms together.

"I had to be, sir. I lost my parents when I was five years old and I've been working ever since."

Draco's mouth worked and opened and closed in shock. "I'm sorry, I didn't know that."

"You never asked," she said quietly while her eyes lowered to the polished wooden floor. "How could you know?"

Draco felt his blood rising a bit to his face. He felt truly terrible and cowardly now. He treated his servants, and even his own family sometimes, with so little regard, that he forgot to realize they might be troubled too. He'd never know would he, if he never asked, as the girl had pointed out. Perhaps she was wiser, and more thoughtful, than he gave her credit for. Though it was rather thoughtless of her to burst into his studio when he was in one of his rages; she had certainly taken a risk there. He almost admired her for her foolish courage.

He sat down at his stool and crossed his legs as he examined her as a painter would a subject.

"Tell me what is your name? I don't think I've ever asked. It was usually...usually my _wife_...that saw after the servants."

He grimaced as he remembered his wife, Astoria, and tried not to think too much of her. Though it filled him with a jealous and murderous rage every time he heard of how Astoria had left him to be the lover of Blaise Zabini, the other painter and his old rival.

"Sir?"

"Yes?" His eyes drew back to her, as he realize he had been ignoring her again, so lost in his thoughts he was. He truly was unhinged at times. "I'm sorry. Your name?" he repeated.

The girl smiled shyly, showing pretty white teeth. "Hermione Granger, sir."

Draco stared absently at her teeth which were surprisingly straight and white for a servants. She had pretty pink lips too, and her features were more refined that the average thick-bodied, rotund faces of the servants he had before.

Suddenly he stood up. "I'm sorry, you must realize you are working for a madman by now," he said, leaning against the arch of the doorway, as his other hand held onto his silken robes. His long pale fingers plucked at a loose thread in his dark robes.

That timid smirk appeared on her face again.

"Well, sir, you do break a lot of plates."

"I have a lot of anger, since my... _wife_...left me," he admitted, hating the sound of 'my wife' or the 'Mistress' though there was no other way to speak of Astoria without using her actual name.

The girl bent on her knees and Draco felt startled for a moment, before realizing what she was doing.

She had a small broom and iron pan in her hands.

"Sorry sir, I'll just clean this up."

She reached out for the broken pieces of porcelain and broken bushes, before glancing up at him and sharing one of those beguiling smiles.

"It'll be alright sir, we'll get you painting again."

Somehow he believed her.

His grey eyes were fixed to her as she strode off with the broken pieces of porcelain and wood in her broom's pan.

He did not know anything about this servant girl, besides her name, but he had a feeling she would change his art and life forever.

~o~


End file.
